by Mark Lisac
“You think he told them it would be a good idea to send a message? Or would they have thought that up themselves?”
“More likely the first. The brothers have nothing to gain by stirring things up, although they are unpredictable.”
“That’s the other reason I called. I don’t know if they were talking to me, or talking to you by coming after me. Thought I should let you know to keep your head up.”
“I will. Thanks. Are you going to be all right?”
“Sure. The house is basically intact. The cops didn’t talk to me long. I don’t think the Carswells will be dumb enough to bother me again. They know things will escalate fast if they try.”
“Okay. Keep in touch if anything looks funny. I’ll try to bring things to a head here. This has to stop.”
They agreed to meet for coffee the next time Finley came up to the rehab hospital. Asher turned off his phone and looked out his window.
Easy enough to say it was time to bring things to a head. Ryan was an expert at avoiding conflict except when it suited him. Asher suspected that skill was central to running a political office. That was why so much coming out of the mouths of politicians and their hired “communications staff ” was mush.
And he still did not know how much Ryan had done on his own and how much Jimmy Karamanlis had ordered, or approved from a semi-informed distance.
The papers said the premier would be arriving home late Sunday night. Asher had a private cellphone number for him, but saw no reason to call before Monday morning.
Even that was getting late. He added up the costs to date. Finley in danger again. Jackson dismayed by the sight of the wreckage that was once a forceful leader. Sandra shivering with distaste bordering on shock after he had asked her to pick through a soggy garbage heap.
He put his mind back to his work. Jack Sherriff was due in. He had glasses with solid black frames and a straightforward manner that suggested dullness but actually reflected a practical frame of mind. Asher liked him. Sherriff could have been a good house framer. Instead, he built high-rises. He had started small, a couple of projects at a time, and had worked his way up to condos and now the commercial centre that Asher was handling for him. He still didn’t like dealing with the municipal bureaucracy despite his years of experience. Asher accepted that working on commercial contracts required enormous effort to keep frustrated clients on track and in good humour. He wondered when he had developed patience. It was a useful tool.
After the meeting with Sherriff and a couple of hours of reading and preparing documents, he left the office. He decided it was too late to fix himself something at home and stopped at the Blue Plate for a large salad with chicken strips. The weather felt too warm for a heavy meal. He could always find a snack in the fridge if he got hungry later.
Back at his building, he strolled a block or two along the walk overlooking the river. Couples were out enjoying the warm evening. Some were young, some were old. One pair held hands. Others looked bored with each other.
The valley looked serene. The spring rush of water from the mountains had passed weeks ago, but the water remained high on the banks, although no longer skimming near the trunks of the first row of cottonwoods and willows.
Two yellow kayaks were pulling into the landing at the park a few hundred metres upstream. The paddlers ran the kayaks up into the bank and stepped out into the edge of the muddy brown water, tinged with streaks of dirty green. The shallow bank of gravelly sand was safe for walking. But safety ended at the water’s edge. Asher knew there were potholes and sudden currents in the river bottom. Even the areas that looked like they could be forded when the river was low were treacherous.
The early summer sun was still well up in the sky. The first hints of pink and lead-blue were showing on the rim of low clouds that always seemed to gather in the west late in the day. Asher walked back to his building, thinking he should look into renting a kayak some weekend. His bad arm would probably stand up to a few hours of paddling.
He took the elevator up to the seventh floor — he hadn’t sought the number deliberately but he hadn’t minded the teasing suggestion of good luck — and fished for his keys as he stepped into the hallway. He opened the door to his condo and stepped in.
35
THE SMELL HIT HIM RIGHT AWAY. IT WAS MUSTY. IT COMBINED the sensations of rotting leaves and old sweat. Not overpowering, but unmistakably there.
A faint trace of dirt and bent fibres led across the carpet to his bedroom. They’re so used to living in it they can’t even tell they bring it with them, he thought. He had no doubt it was the Carswells. The issue was whether they had brought help again. He didn’t think so. They wouldn’t have had time.
He casually opened the closet door and reached into the shadow on the near side for his sawed-off hockey stick. He hadn’t been sure why he’d kept it there but was happy that he had. There seemed no point in thinking things through. He wasn’t going to call the police. And if he wasn’t, it was better to act fast.
He heard a faint scuffle from the bedroom. Just like a rodent’s scuffle behind a wall. They live up to their nickname, he thought. He had to give them that.
The sound probably meant they were getting into position. He strode away from the closet and around the corner to the bedroom. He expected one of the brothers to attract his attention and the other to jump him from behind, if it really was only the two of them.
The door was slightly ajar, the way he would have left it in the morning. The closed curtains kept out the twilight and made the room dim. Asher pushed the door open and rushed in, intending to inflict maximum surprise and to get away from whichever one was going to be behind him.
He saw Lenny, as he expected. Kenny, the whining little sneak, would be the one unwilling to take him head-on.
Lenny had gone old-school. Asher saw a bicycle chain in a leather glove. Neither of them uttered a sound as Asher sprang at Lenny. He bulled Lenny backward over the night table and risked taking the time to bring the stick down on his abdomen. It might knock the breath out of him and would certainly hurt like hell.
Kenny leapt at him faster than he’d expected. A heavy weight thudded onto Asher’s back as he stood half-bent over Lenny at the end of his swing. Kenny drew up his baseball bat for another swing. Asher lashed out backhanded with his stick and caught one of Kenny’s forearms, making him howl in pain. Asher kicked a shin. Kenny didn’t have enough breath left for another howl — all he could do was silently open his mouth. He didn’t go down but seemed momentarily immobilized. Asher was happy not to see anyone else in the room. His back hurt but Kenny had not been able to hit him full force while they were both in motion and he was sure none of his ribs was broken. He began to turn back to Lenny but ran out of time.
Metal whipped across the side of his face, ripping raggedly across his cheek just above his right jaw. The chain flicked hard on his lower lip and some of his teeth. He slowed down in shock.
Lenny brought the chain back for another swing but was slowed down himself by the blow to his gut and by the glancing blow his head took on a bedpost as he fell over the table. He swung again wildly. This time the chain ripped into the shoulder of Asher’s good arm. The ragged new laceration stung but was not a stopping blow.
Asher wheeled around, threw up his left arm to take the force of the third swing, kicked at Lenny’s groin and smashed the stick twice across his left ear. He turned back to Kenny, punched him in the gut, aiming at his liver, until he sagged toward the floor. Asher kicked him in the head once to make sure he would keep still and quiet.
He turned back to Lenny, who was half-propped against a wall. He felt blood trickling from his lip and cheek and whacked Lenny in the mouth with
the wooden part of the stick, using the taped lead weight to add force to the blow.
All three of them were gasping now. Asher went back to Kenny and dragged him closer to his brother so that he could watch both of them.
He lifted his arm to swing again at Lenny’s face but decided he wanted information more than revenge. He pointed the lead-weighted tip of the stick at Lenny’s left eye and began pushing.
The damage to his mouth made it hard to talk but he cried out, “Why are you here? Why are you here?”
He fought off the urge to whack Lenny on the temple or the side of the head and pressed the stick harder on the closed eye, watching the mounded flesh of the lid go flatter. He heard Lenny emit a strange sound, a despairing, fearful “Aaahhhh!” Then he pulled the stick away from Lenny’s face.
Asher felt a crimson ring of rage slowly withdraw its spikes and recede from around his head. A self-protective reflex would have produced anger, he thought. This rage had gone beyond that. Anger would have welled up like a volcanic lava flow. This felt like a living entity writhing within him. It had urged him to push the end of the stick through Lenny’s eye, to keep pushing as far as he possibly could.
He shuffled to the end of his bed and sat down. Kenny was slow to come around but Lenny was opening his eyes and staring questions.
Asher looked at him. He saw intelligence, but of a different sort than he was used to. It was based on instinctive cunning rather than analytical process. He saw nothing beyond fear and calculation in Lenny’s eyes. But he thought fear and calculation might be enough.
“What do you idiots think you’re doing?” Asher asked.
Lenny kept breathing heavily.
Asher looked down at the stick he was holding across his lap, making sure to keep both the brothers in his field of vision. “I used to be a hockey player,” he said. “I loved the game, and the hitting. I stopped watching a couple of years ago. I got tired of owners using an NHL franchise as a lever to get rich with TV deals and real estate developments around arenas they had persuaded other people to pay for. Mostly I got tired of the violence. The muggings during a lot of the playoffs. The way good players could get knocked out of the game with deliberate hits to the head, and then get blamed for not watching out for themselves. The way that a lot of people in and around the game seemed to think all that was normal. It started seeming more and more abnormal. I couldn’t watch it anymore. Now look at me.”
He saw them looking at him as if he were raving gibberish. “Why did you come here?” he said. “Why did you firebomb Finley’s house and what were you intending to do to me?”
Lenny shifted his weight and looked as if he intended to drag himself up.
“Siddown,” Asher growled. “I don’t want to hurt you anymore, but I will if I have to.”
Lenny let his body go limp and sank back. He looked at his brother, who was starting to come around.
“What are you doing?” Asher said. “We had a deal. Why are you starting this again?”
Lenny mustered most of a sneer. “Yeah, we had a deal. You were going to go back on it, you fucker. You were going to burn us.”
Asher kept calm, relieved that he had finally got one of them talking, the smart one at that. “What do you mean, I was going to burn you? What good would that do me? Where’d you get that idea?”
“He told us. The guy who hired us. He told us you were going after him and that meant everything was going to come out. You were going after him and you would burn us to get to him.”
“This is the red-haired guy?”
“Yeah.”
“And you still don’t know his name?”
“No. We didn’t want anything more to do with him after last winter. He left us alone and we were forgetting about him. Then he called the other night.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“What I told you. He said you were being a smart-ass prick. He said you were asking questions again and you were trying to destroy him. He said if you got to him, we’d end up in the slammer too. For everything.”
“Everything.” Asher felt one of his lower front teeth with his tongue. It felt cracked. The incisor behind it was loose. He reached in with a finger and pressed it down. It would probably stay in place if he was careful, he thought. He could get an emergency appointment with a dentist in the morning. The dentist didn’t have to see the torn skin on his shoulder. The damage around his mouth could probably be explained as resulting from a bicycle accident and a fall onto another bike’s chain and gear wheel.
“It’s been nearly half a year,” he said. “If I wanted to burn you for what happened in the barn, wouldn’t I already have done that?”
Lenny kept looking at him, suspicious, defiant, calculating.
“Didn’t it occur to you that redhead was using you? He’s worried about himself and instead of dealing with me himself he gets you two to go after me and Finley. What were you supposed to do to us?”
Lenny hesitated, but said, “Scare you off.”
“Scare me off. You tried to set Finley’s house on fire and you came to my house with a bike chain and a baseball bat. That looks like more than scaring.”
“We only used a little gasoline on the house. And we aimed the bottle at the stucco. If the place burned down, it was his fault for not looking after it better. We didn’t come here with a gun or knives. I told Kenny not to bring anything like that in the truck. Yeah, we’ve done stuff. We don’t go around killing people. We’re not psychos like you.”
Asher let Lenny look at him a few more moments, giving the suspicious eyes more time to gauge just how much of a psycho he might be, how close he might be to doing more than beat the crap of out two guys just trying to survive in a difficult world.
“We didn’t do anything,” Lenny said. “It’s your fault.”
“What does anything mean, Lenny? I know the two of you got hired to scare Angela Apson and then her brother. I know your stupid brother cost Finley a leg. What else?”
Lenny’s mouth pressed tighter. It began making motions like he was chewing gum. Kenny looked sideways at him and opened his mouth to say something but apparently decided this was not a good time to get his brother mad at him.
Lenny said, “Nothing else.”
“Nothing? How did Orion Devereaux die? Funny things are happening around Barnsdale and then a guy who should have a lot of life left in him just happens to die while all the rest was going on.”
Lenny kept making chewing motions but Asher saw his eyes slightly widen. “That was an accident,” he said.
“So the cops said.”
“It was an accident. We’re not crazy. We do stuff. We’re just trying to make a living. We don’t kill people. We’ve never killed anyone.”
“No? What was Kenny trying to do when he shot Finley? Was he trying to take off Finley’s leg or was he trying to blow me in half ?”
“He got mad and scared because you hurt him and he saw you were going to hurt me, hurt me bad. I told him before we got there to leave the gun alone.”
“Maybe I should have used it on you,” Kenny blurted. “Maybe there’ll be a next time and I’ll aim better.”
“Shut up,” Lenny half-sobbed, half-screamed.
“What about Devereaux?” Asher said.
Lenny glared at him.
“Do I have to beat it out of you? Your brother won’t help you. He doesn’t have a shotgun with him and he’s too limp-wristed to stand up to me without one. He wouldn’t even be able to aim straight if he had one.” Asher stood up. He put on his best smirk and took a step towa
rd Lenny.
“Wait. Wait.”
Asher stopped. He stepped back and sat on the bed again as Lenny started talking.
“It was an accident, like I said. We were supposed to scare him too. I don’t know why. The redhead said we should scare him bad. It wouldn’t matter if he got hurt a little bit. That’s why we didn’t do anything out at that farm he was visiting. He was supposed to be scared, but we weren’t supposed to jump him or anything like that. We set it up so he’d either have a near miss on the road or get into an accident, one that he would survive with airbags in that tank of a Mercedes he drove. How were we supposed to know he’d come flying over a blind hill in the dark with snow all over the road? He ended up flying, all right. Right off the road and into a fencepost. Stupid bastard. That’s what those stuck-up pricks get, driving cars that make them too good for anyone else.”
“I drive a vintage Jaguar, Lenny. What does that make me?”
“It makes you a stuck-up prick who also thinks he’s fucking James Bond or something.”
“And what did redhead say about why Devereaux had to be scared? You’re a dumb shit, but not so dumb that you’d take a chance like that without having a good reason.”
“He gave us reasons. A lot of them. All in cash.”
“I’ve had it with you, Lenny. No more. What did he say?”
Lenny stopped chewing his nonexistent gum. “He said Devereaux didn’t know his place. He was bothering too many people.”
Asher decided he wasn’t going to extract any more information from them. “You and your brother get out of here now. Don’t come back. Don’t go near Finley. Don’t let either of us hear your names again. Don’t be tempted to do anything stupid. And don’t talk to the redhead again. If he calls, hang up on him. Don’t say anything to him. Hang up.”
